Leonard Wright Jr., 78, Writer Who Dared to Change Fishing

By WOLFGANG SAXON

Published: September 6, 2001

Leonard Marshall Wright Jr., a former New York advertising executive whose many writings about trout fishing were initially seen as blasphemous by traditional anglers, died Aug. 24 on the way to a hospital near his summer home in Claryville, N.Y., in the Catskills. He was 78. A former resident of the West Village, he lived in Islamorada, Fla.

The apparent cause was a heart attack, his family said.

Mr. Wright's first book, ''Fishing the Dry Fly as a Living Insect'' (E. P. Dutton, 1972) raised the hackles of some reviewers and weekend fishermen.

The sportswriter Red Smith wondered in The New York Times whether its author could possibly still be alive. Surely, Mr. Smith wrote, ''he must have been struck dead for blasphemy, for he had the audacity to suggest that the high priest, Frederic Halford, and such sainted subdeacons as Theodore Gordon, George M. L. LaBranche and Edward Ringwood Hewitt had rocks in their heads when it came to floating a tuft of feather and silk over a trout.''

The Halford gospel, Mr. Smith noted, taught that the fly should be cast upstream and floated down ''in an absolutely dead drift.'' Mr. Wright cast down and across and twitched the fly as he did to suggest to the fish that ''here is something alive, edible and defenseless.''

But Mr. Smith tried the Wright method and then accepted, as he wrote, ''what Mr. Wright tells us now -- that nothing brings out the essential bully in a trout like a live bug he knows he can whip.''

Mr. Wright lived to write 10 more books, some still in print.

Leonard Wright was born in Boston, the son of an investment banker, and went to Milton Academy. His studies at Harvard University were interrupted by service as a fighter pilot in Europe. In early 1945, his P-51 Mustang crashed in Germany, and he was held prisoner until the war in Europe ended that May.

After graduating from Harvard in 1947, Mr. Wright worked for the advertising agencies Batten, Barton, Durstine & Osborn, and J. Walter Thompson, and for Look magazine. From 1971 to 1978 he was a marketing and promotion manager at The New York Times, to which he also contributed articles.

Mr. Wright is survived by a daughter, Anson E. Wright of Cambridge, Mass.; two sons, Leonard W. III of Fort Collins, Colo., and Alexander of Manhattan; a brother, Winslow of Seattle; two sisters, Priscilla Allen of Sandy Spring, Md., and Cynthia Lasserre of Paris; and two grandchildren. His marriage to the former Shirley Anson ended in divorce.

Mr. Wright gained much of his trout expertise on Catskill property he bought that included a branch of the Neversink River.

His book ''Neversink: One Angler's Intense Exploration of a Trout River'' (The Atlantic Monthly Press, 1991) was as much about nature as about trout and how to catch and prepare one for dinner. Reviewing it in the The New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called it more than just a good trout-fishing primer or refresher.

''The reader will learn too, not the rote lessons of stray disconnected facts that so many fishing books try to teach you,'' he wrote, ''how to read the stream, select a fly, how to cast, how to hook and land a fish -- but instead an exercise in environmental reason, a picture of the world in which all those lessons fit together naturally.''